Do Not Go Gently Into That Bent Note

I had the kind of father who would learn the blues harmonica. No-one else I knew had a father, or any other kind of relative, who even remotely learned the blues harmonica. Legally, it is grounds for divorce if your spouse learns the blues harmonica in the confines of the marital home but, my mother didn’t avail herself of that recourse. For that, she must be admired for her powers of endurance.

The thing about ‘learning the blues harmonica’, and I’ve been through this myself, is that you must persevere until you are able to ‘bend a note’. This is essential and can take weeks if not months. You must ‘bend’ the note to make the bluesy, howling, Smokestack Lightning, train-done-leave-the-station, lonesome whippoorwill sound; without it, it aint nothing but a flat holler.

My mother would be ben the living room watching how the Sugden’s were getting on down on Emmerdale Farm while, through in his little box room at the end of the loaby, my Da would be giving it big licks trying to get that fucking note to bend. To her, it sounded like some kind of small rodent being penetrated anally by a dentist’s drill (although I’m pretty sure she never envisioned it in these terms). And, to the neighbours too, many of them elderly and confused by alcohol, it must have sounded like some novel form of domestic abuse that not even old wife-beating Scotland had heard about.

The agony, however, is not put at an end by the final, orgasmic ‘bending of the note’. The achievement of this makes you believe that you are the re-incarnation of the original Sonny Boy Williamson, and you just can’t stop bending the note.

Indeed, my mother, and the long-suffering and bewildered neighbours may have wished for the time before the bending of the note. At least then there was some hope he would give up…

Outsiders

Life has been interesting as an 'outsider'. The thing about being an outsider is that one invariably finds only 'other outsiders' to socialise or fornicate with. Only other 'outsiders' will have anything, of this nature, to do with you. This makes for some interesting matchings, If I can put it like that?

Take 'Big Ginny'. She rode a red moped and wore a bright yellow skid-lid. I would ride pillion. Obviously she wouldn't talk much while driving the moped but, even when she wasn’t; it was hard to get three words out of her. She only really liked riding her moped.

Which made me wonder why she had bothered to place an ad in the lonely hearts column in the first place. Or, why didn’t she put on it ‘Only really like riding moped. Seeking same’. But, there you go! I ended up ‘going out with her’ or, more specifically, riding pillion on her moped or sitting silently in a pub somewhere nursing our halves of shandy.

Not even fornication!

My pals tend to be a bit odd too. Take Bryant. Now, he’s a bright bloke but very flawed and damaged. He’s Scottish and tends to drink to the point of serious self-harm when he’s down about something. Doesn’t need to be very much, he’ll just do it if he’s fed-up or something. From the outside it looks like a very slow suicide attempt. A very slow, Scottish style suicide attempt. Sometimes, if I ever think of Scotland in this light, usually if Bryant is either doing this or trying to recover from it, it looks as if rather a lot of Scottish people are in the process of killing themselves slowly. Mind you, we have our drinkers, even here in Essex.

Bryant plays guitar very impressively I think, but he doesn’t think he does. This is typical of how Bryant will down-grade himself. It is quite frustrating when he does this. But, there’s no telling him. He tells me there’s a Scots word ‘thrawn’ that sums this attitude up nicely. It seems to mean stubborn and against your best interests. If this is right then it doesn’t seem right to me. Why would you deliberately go against your own best interests?

Vic, he’s another friend of mine. Another northern loner. There’s definitely a difference between north and south in the UK. We don’t think the same. Take me. I’ll always have an eye out for my own safety; my own interests. Only in a small sense, you understand. I’m not some big businessman seizing the main chance. Far from it. I just mean, I’ll try to keep things tight and secure. I won’t spend what I can’t afford. I won’t drink to excess. I won’t put myself in danger. Northerners seem to do all these things and more. They have self-destruct in their mentality. Their temperaments are volatile. It’s pure chance and the fact that we are all outsiders that we know each other at all. Vic and Bryant and me are all in the same band. I’m the singer, Bryant and Vic play guitars, Glenn from Wales (another emotionally unstable bloke) plays bass and the drummer is an exotically handsome chap called Mervyn who is from New Zealand.

Neither Mervyn nor the rest of us is quite sure what he’s doing with this band of losers.

Bryant writes the songs and I write some of the lyrics. My favourite is ‘D’Arblay Streetwalker’ which is about a prostitute I used to visit in Soho.

I’m really quite sex mad. I even changed my religion for a girl who said she wouldn’t sleep with anyone outside of her religion. For this reason, I was Jewish but I am now, in the eyes of God, a Catholic.

She still didn’t sleep with me.

I’ve been an outsider for as long as I can remember. This state of affairs has only gotten worse as the years have gone on.

My mother, I think, is mentally ill, and my father pretends he’s deaf. The latter, I believe, is a consequence of the former. My father is an architect. He helps design some of the most boring buildings it is possible for the human mind to imagine. Office blocks; civic centres; maybe even public conveniences. Functional, concrete and unimaginative.

I don’t know who he is, but there’s long been word in the air that he has affairs. I, for one, hope that he does.

My mother is a scrawny, bitter woman. She gets tiddly on cider and pills and tells everyone she’s ‘on good terms’ with the esteemed actor, Derek Jacobi.

I am her greatest disappointment.

I amble down to the corner café on Newbury Park Road and have a mixed grill for my breakfast. I’ve lived nearly all of my life here in Gants Hill. It’s where Jews who do quite well aspire to. When I was a young boy we lived in Clapton, east London. My mother has always said that I’d never be the man my father was (is) and she’s been proved right so far. I am not my father. I am nothing.

Or, maybe I’m a poet.

Bryant says I live in a time capsule which is trapped in a cosmic vortex sometime in the year nineteen seventy two. This is because he thinks that most of the bands I like are from around that period. He calls me ‘Mister Prog-Rock’. He gets annoyed when I sing entire King Crimson songs on the tube. We get the tube to go busking in town, but I’ve got a bit of a mad streak (psychologically and in terms of my sense of fun). Sometimes, I’ll just get up and sing and dance. This tends to happen on tube trains.

People tend not to like me doing this. Sometimes Bryant laughs uproariously, other times he moves to another carriage.

I know the lyrics to every King Crimson song that contains lyrics (there are many instrumentals in their impressive canon). The vast, vast majority of people don’t know the lyrics to even one. Atomic Rooster, Babe Ruth, East of Eden, Stackridge are all bands I like. But, King Crimson are tops for me. I’ve spoken to Robert Fripp on many occasions and I believe he now recognises me.

I tend to go to see the same bands over and over again. It’s ritualistic really.

Bryant says that singing along with songs on LPs is ‘highly irritating’ as it means he can’t hear the singer on the record. ‘If you think you can sing better than Paul Rogers then all well and good’ he says ‘but, it’s Paul that’s on the album, not you’.

A lot of things about me seem to annoy Bryant.

Extract from 'The Starship Leith'

Howard Rubens, or ‘Rube’ to his friends, had no idea why he was now living in Leith. One minute he was walking round to his local café in Gants Hill for his morning stodge, the next he was feeling decidedly cold and under-dressed in the Leith Walk Café eating what looked like dog poo and drinking tea the colour of mud. Not, only that, but the place seemed to be full of Scots! He’d been asked only £4.50 for his surprisingly tasty repast (the ‘dog poo’ had been, of course stovies), and saw no reason why he should not now investigate his predicament further in the street outside only to find that none of it resembled Gants Hill at all. It didn’t resemble Ilford, Newbury Park or even Dagenham. He wondered if maybe the powerful anti-psychotics he took were to blame, and he was now suffering baffling hallucinations. 

He asked a passer-by outside a shop that seemed to be selling computers and dart-boards where he in fact was. He was answered with a ‘Leith Walk, mate’ that sounded like a declaration of war more than simple geographical information. Leith Walk? What the fuck was a ‘Leith Walk’? He’d never heard of a Leith Walk.

It was then that Bryant had appeared all smiles and laughter.

“You made it, old friend. I wished for it and here you are”

Pleased as he was to see his old mucker he felt as if his brain had been poured through an industrial-strength food blender then pureed back into his head via the constellation Canis Major where the doppleganger soul of a 1980s talent show host urged him to say “Tonight Matthew, I’m going off my fucking nut!”

“It’s like that time you kidnapped me and took me to France”

“Many years ago Rube, many years ago”

Bryant and a mutual friend named Army Joe had sprung Rube from Goodmayes mental hospital and wheeched him across the channel on a hovercraft to land at Calais. From there they marched toward Boulogne, slept a night in a caravan park toilet and in the morning hitched to Paris where they would annoy and baffle Metro commuters with renditions of ‘The Wild Rover’ and ‘A Pub With No Beer’. One ticket collector at The Trocadero asked them to move along as ‘they were making him nervous’.

"Like draws aye to like, like an auld horse to a fell dyke"

Bryant was fond of baffling his old friend with quaint Scottish proverbs.

Rube would spend days ruminating over them.

Rube’s big hero was Spike Milligan. Bryant envied him the ability to recite large swathes of Milligan material word-for-word and in perfect imitation. Rube was also a keen misogynist and would make a point of ignoring women, especially ones he found attractive, to a degree that was embarrassing to all concerned. He’d run away from Madeleine Cathcart on a number of occasions, one time running out of the Water o’ Leith shouting ‘unclean, unclean’. His ill-disposition toward the female sex just happened to be in direct proportion to their failings in succumbing to his hard-core physical desires, and even most of the more soft-core ones.

Rube was a balding ball of a bloke in an undersized Leyton Orient replica top which barely covered his gibbous moon of a belly. The waistband of his cheap chino’s strained to the limit and, if the stretching button popped it may have someone’s eye out.

If he was sexually attractive, it was only to those of the female world so far down the road of dementia-d bewilderment that they would be prepared to believe that he was the re-incarnation of a heterosexual Rock Hudson sent to Leith to seek out g-spots in council care homes.

In secret he imagined himself a Jewish super-sleuth named Maurice Speigel who Bogarted his way around London’s east end making young women swoon and clipping gangsters on the chin when they fell out of line. As a side-line, Speigel was a cashier at a local but lucrative tailoring outfit. Even in fantasy Rube was pragmatic.

His other hero was the emperor Caligula. Bryant had once told him that the mad emperor was fond of shoving rotting vegetables up his arse and setting them alight. Rube had found his vision of this occurrence hilarious.

Rube had written two songs for the band Bryant and he had started in the mid to late seventies. One was ‘The Amazing Mickey Titz (Is Covered in Yellow Dust)’ and the other was about Polish football legend Zbigniew Boniek. 'I Really Love You Zbigniew' had a rather incongruous reggae beat (one would have thought of 10CC's Dreadlock Holiday but Rube's song was better and more meaningful).

Bryant bid Rube stroll with him around the deciduous Leith Links. He calmed his old friend’s nerves advising him of comforting sleeping arrangements and the prospect of pints in pubs which were ‘nothing like Trainspotting’. 

The Boo Backit Brig

The Boo Backit Brig stood at the very centre of the little town of Bedpan, East Lothian. Built around the month of Juloon many centuries ago it arched the slim River Bonny as it pebbled its way out to the North Sea. Historical accounts tell us that the English King, Bastardabus, stood on this bridge after the fearsome battle of Badger’s Chuff and proclaimed “You can keep your shitey little country. All you have of worth to merry England are Macaroon Bars and I’ve just stolen a castle’s-worth, so fuck you and your miserable rain and words like ‘dreich’”. The proud folk of Bedpan pelted him with ‘coos-dung’ and he and his army ran for the border never to return.

Folk would meet on the Boo Backit Brig then go for tea and scones at ‘Loopy Lorna’s’. Folk would meet under the Boo Backit Brig in the hours of darkness on a Saturday night. Many of the town were conceived under the Brig, others were married upon it in happy ceremonies when posies were thrown on the river and luck-wished to lands beyond. The pub on its western edge was called, un-controversially, The Boo Backit Brig. One could buy eponymously named toffee in the town’s confectioners, and many a kitchen locally and afar was adorned with tea-towels bearing its image.

“Skulls and bones!” proclaimed ‘Lord Bedpan’ to his meagre library audience of fifteen ‘usual suspects’, the loyal members of The Boo Backit Brig Historical Society, thirteen of whom were still barely awake. “Skull and bones, innards and skin; maybe eyes and teeth as well for all we know!” Everyone in the town knew that ‘Lord Bedpan’ wasn’t really a Lord of the realm, or anything like it. He claimed noble antecedence through a miasmic genealogy which included brigands, ice cream manufacturers, whoremasters, school-teachers, pig-farmers and disgraced sheriff officers to who he claimed had been the very first Lord Bedpan, who wasn’t a legitimate Lord either but a convicted ‘horse-fouler’ from Pinkie Cleugh.

The present ‘Lord Bedpan’ - real name Tam Mutton - claimed to own historical evidence that the Boo Backit Brig had been constructed from the remains of witches drowned in the river in those barbarous, paranoid days when any women unable to make a cake rise was a ‘daughter of the devil’.

He claimed to possess ‘early photographs’ of the actual drownings taking place. To anyone with half a brain it was easy to see that these photographs were populated by folk belonging to the Historical Society dressed up in what looked like flowing tablecloths, curtains and auld pinnies posing as witches and their executioners acting out events on the river (in some you could see the pub in the background, its drunken customers shouting contemptible oaths at the foolish fraudster-thespians).

But, as we know, people will believe any old shite, so skulls and bones was legend to the many, and truth to the deluded few.

The fact that it was actually true would only be discovered after the great flood when the Boo Backit Brig revealed all its gory secrets...

Dylan: The Dundee Connection

Bob Dylan, master songwriter and septuagenarian, was sitting at his breakfast bar in his ranch in Colorado. In his hand he held a letter from a fan. He didn’t usually pay much attention to fan-mail. He reckoned that if your life was sad enough that you had to write letters to folk you didn’t know, then he pretty much didn’t want anything to do with you.

This letter, though, was very different from the common herd. It was from a man from Dundee, Scotland who was claiming to be the maestro’s son.

The author of this letter, one Hughie ‘Shug’ McDivvett, claimed that the singer had had a sexual episode back in the mid-sixties with his mother, Eileen, then Beattie, who worked in the Electric Bakery where, he claimed, Dylan had gone ‘for a pie or a bridie’. The rasp-voiced bard had asked Eileen out for the evening and the resultant passion produced Shug.

Dylan was intrigued by this. He’d had so many sexual encounters in his long life that it was hard to identify single occasions. That he’d been to Dundee in the mid-sixties wasn’t difficult to confirm through the legions of books which listed all his tour dates for nutcases who cared about such things. He’d played a venue named Dundee Caird Hall during his infamous 1965 tour of the UK when he’d been called ‘Judas’ for his new electric sound.

One thing that he now brought to mind was how fascinated and confused he was by the local dialect, though he could barely make it out.

He even remembered visiting a strange little shop that sold all sorts of savoury pastries and garishly coloured cakes. If he remembered rightly, and it was an awful long time ago, he and his friend Bobby Neuwirth were very stoned and spotting the foodstuffs in the window and the wonderful smell that emanated from the wee shop, were compelled to investigate.

There had been a very pretty red-head behind the counter that he’d been instantly attracted to. Bobby had asked her what nutritional delights were on offer (that’s the way he spoke, usually followed by falling-about laughter) and the girl had said ‘mainly peh’s’ and she indicated some strange looking things steaming in a glass case. They asked her to repeat what she’d called them and she repeated ‘peh’s’.

For some reason this had cracked the pair of them up, and he smiled even now reminiscing about the sweetly stoned uproarious laughter shared by he and his old friend. They called anything remotely resembling pie a ‘peh’ for the rest of the tour and other folk had no idea what they were talking about.

But, to the substantive points, firstly; if he’d hosed the girl and, secondly; if he was responsible for this Shug character, he had no real idea. Many had tried to claim paternity on his ass before in an effort to access his fortune and he’d taken responsibility where he had to and batted the rest away with DNA tests, but this Dundee affair?

He decided to take the bull by the horns and ring the number on the letter, a voice answered..

“Aye aye, Shug McDivvett speking, ken, likesay?”

Bob Dylan listened closely but it was mainly instinct which led him to say hi and reveal his identity as maybe the most iconic rock star of the past 60 years.

“away an shite ya dobber, who is this? Is that you Malky?”

Dylan was a master of language, learned people had likened him to Keats and Rimbaud but he was at a loss with ‘dobber’ and people asking if he was ‘Malky’.

“You wrote me saying that I was your father, do you remember that?”

He could hear this McDivvett individual racking his probably addled brain.

“Och, that wis ma maw ken? She wis bletherin’ aboot ye and said ye’d shagged her yonks ago an thit ah wis yer wean n’that. Her heids waistit, ah telt her there wis cack a’ tae it bit ah said ahd write tae ye jist tae stoap her spraffin”

Dylan had known Davy Furey back in the New York days and had been a friend of Van Morrison’s the longest time. He fancied himself to be a Celtic bard in many ways and had even sang a song called ‘My Heart is in the Highlands’ but what this man was speaking might just as well have been Korean for all the sense it made to him.

There was only one question he could think to ask this man. The answer to it would prove nothing but it seemed to matter to Dylan somewhere deep in his heart. He knew his heart would concede something if he could hear it just one more time, though he could hardly believe what he was going to say next.

“Sir…?”

“Aye fire away, buddy”

“In America we would ask for a piece of pie. What would you call it where you are?”

There was a moments silence when both men realised they were the only two parts of a very bizarre conversation indeed. The one was the composer of some of the most revered songs in twentieth century popular culture, who had played in front of millions, was the holder of the French Legion d’honneur, played for presidents and kings. The other was an unemployed plumber from Broughty Ferry. The one felt inexplicable anticipation about the answer, the other utter puzzlement.

“A peh…?”

Bob Dylan hadn’t laughed so much in years.Top of Form

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